Platformer Example for Construct 2

This is a fully commented project file for Scirra Construct 2, created to supplement my demonstration of the software at the Iowa City Game Dev Meetup in October 2015. You can play the (very simple and limited) game in your browser and download the attached project file to modify the source to your heart's content.

Created in a few hours, this is far from a "complete" game and has a few minor bugs and failings that I purposely did not bother to fix. Instead, I challenge you to open the project yourself and see if you can figure out how you might resolve these issues and improve the overall gameplay experience. Here are some prompts to get you started:

If an enemy moves past the far left of the screen, they fall off the platform and the player can no longer destroy them, thus making the game impossible to win. Perhaps they should turn around when they hit the edge of the stage?

If the player dies, the game continues on without any sort of prompt to restart or continue. How might you remedy this?

The "Explosion" sound effect plays at the start of the level, even though there are no explosions on-screen. Why?

The player's animations can have trouble updating in some situations. Maybe there are some more Platform events that you should be listening for when updating animations?

Currently, the game increments the VictoryCount global variable each time you win and restart. How might you add this to the "heads up display" layer so the player can know how many times they've won?

The most important question of all: Is the game fun? If not, how would you make it more fun? Make the level design and enemy behaviors more complex? Add more levels? How about randomly generating enemy spawns and seeing how long the player can survive?

The attached CAPX file has been tested with the free version of Construct to ensure it doesn't exceed any of the program's limitations. You can freely export the game to HTML5 and host it online as long as you mind these limitations when making your additions/changes. I recommend using Dropbox as a quick, free, and easy way of hosting your game online.

I hope you enjoy playing around with this project! You're absolutely welcome to share and distribute the source and any modified versions you create, but please credit us accordingly. If you do anything cool with this project, please e-mail us at virtuallycompetent@gmail.com or tweet me (@donkeyspaceman) with a link to a playable web build! I'm very excited to see what you create and I'm always happy to look at your project if you're having issues (though I'm not an expert by any means)!